This blog is an excerpt from Smarsh blog (which was an excerpt from Best Practices for Social Media Archiving and Security from Osterman Research). The full report is available for download here.

Absence of Social Media Policies in Many Organizations

A large proportion of organizations do not have written policies about the use various types of social media.

Osterman Research believes that all organizations should have a set of detailed and thorough social media policies that includes a number of things, including:

Specification about the tools that are and are not permitted for use on the corporate network.

Rules about whether or not employees can speak on behalf of the company and the extent to which they can do so.

The types of content that can be shared via social media.

To what extent personal accounts can be used for business purposes.

Unambiguous details about who owns social media contacts, such as Twitter followers, if and when an employee leaves the company.

Initial training of end users on these policies and continual training as policies are updated.

2. Content is Not Properly Archived

Organizations that do not archive content from social media platforms face significant and growing risks from their inaction.

3. Data Can Be Breached

Social media provides another avenue by which corporate data can be breached. For example:

Loss of customer lists

Revelation of trade secrets through geolocation

Accidental release of confidential information

4. An Ingress Point for Malware

The majority of social media users have not had their accounts hacked or been the victim of malware infiltration, but this has occurred for nearly one in five organizations surveyed. Another one in four organizations cannot determine with any certainty the source of their malware infiltration.

This blog is an excerpt from Smarsh blog (which was an excerpt from Best Practices for Social Media Archiving and Security from Osterman Research). The full report is available for download here.